5 Healthy Reasons to Pour Hot Sauce on Your Food

If you love adding hot sauce to your food, you already know the wonders it does to your tastebuds. But hot sauce offers more than just flavor, it can actually help trim your waste. Here are five reasons to pour on the sriracha and Tabasco.

1. It has few calories. While other flavorful condiments like ketchup have tons of calories, hot sauce does the same at a fraction of the calories. It varies from brand to brand, but most hot sauces are approximately six calories per tablespoon.

2. It boosts your metabolism. Hot sauce offers a boost of vitamin C and capsaicin, a compound found in hot peppers that is responsible for the serious heat. But even better than sheer flavor factor, vitamin C and capsaicin have both been shown to assist in revving up your metabolism.

3. It helps with aging. A large study recently confirmed that individuals who ate spicy food on the regular were more likely to live longer than those who don’t.

4. It helps keep you satisfied. By keeping your food spicy, you’ll need to eat a little more slowly. Hot sauce is a great way to pace yourself if you tend to be a fast eater.

5. It’s full of vitamins. Hot sauce is a source of vitamin C, which is necessary for the production of collagen, a protein required to help wounds heal. Hot sauce contains vitamin A, folate, magnesium and potassium, so it imparts more nutritional value to your food.